I had a dream I was back in New York last week. It was pretty sweet. So anyway, here’s some more memories of my trip there in November:

Around Central Park, some guy came up to me and told me he was selling a CD he’d made. I figured, hey, I could give that to Marq, I could. He’s the type of guy what would be interested in music stuff some random guy came up with (Kiiip meanwhile got a keychain with a sexy fireman). Anyway, here is what the album cover looked like:

So anyway, I paid five or seven bucks (I don’t remember which) and that was that. Eventually I came home and since I didn’t see Marq for like a month after my return, the CD just sat on my filing cabinet innocently. Then, when I finally do see him and give it to him, he tries it and finds out that it is way blank. It’s a blank CD. Guy is totally just scamming folk into buying a blank CD.

It’s a brilliant scheme, really. Buy a stack of CDs, throw some album cover on there and tell people you made some music. But what really makes it work is the bizarre and even confusing level of detail. The fact that he threw a twitter address on there? That’s awesome. The adorable little kid holding something (a cucumber?) and apparently having been awarded second place in some event (cucumber championship?) is also pleasing because of how nonsensical it was. And the fact it is labelled “Part 2” (or is that Part 0.2?). It is so much detail for a completely pointless cover. You could get as much of an effect with an album cover consisting of white text on a black background, probably, but this guy went above and beyond.

I can even forgive “alot” being one word and “N” being used for “and”. The whole money-grubbing theme of the title, which I had considered unfortunate at first, makes perfect sense as part of the scam. Basically, I’m saying, this being a scam is probably a far better present for Marq than an actual CD would have been.

The only drawback I can see is that maybe he will make people less trusting of actual people trying to sell actual music they’ve actually made. But y’know what? Screw those guys. They should stop trying to live their dream and get jobs that will help society. Like selling neckties or something.

Anyway, while I’m on the topic of my trip, I remembered something else that occurred while I was in New York. It goes a little something like a this:

I was at FAO Schwartz (the toy store where Big danced on a big keyboard) and I saw massive Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for sale. Like, huge. When I picked it up, it was heavier than a hardcover phone book. It was two cups, each the size of one of those frozen chicken pies they have at the grocery store. So, I saw these and I was like “I’m buying that thing and I’m going to eat it with my mouth!” so I took it and when I got to the register I was told it would cost like TWENTY-FIVE Dollars!!! (!) Now, I ask you. What is the real scam here, that guy selling the fake album, or candy so prohibitively expensive that it makes any hatred that poor countries feel toward us entirely justified?

Anyway, I still bought it of course. The day that I got it, one of them was the only thing I ate, it filled me so much. It was deliciously disgusting. If you ever want to cure someone of a Reese addiction, force them to eat one of those. By the end of that first cup, I never wanted to eat another item of food in my life. With the second cup I took my time and it lasted a couple more days and didn’t make me hate myself as much. So twenty-five bucks is one expensive candy, but it did last three days. Weigh the options and see which is more important to you. I think I can only give Giant Reese’s Cups Three out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake, because that’s about a perfect representation of their balance between horrible and wonderful.

I’m now slightly less busy, so I figure I should post some more. And I’ve got the trip to New York to give me, basically, a post for free. But that said, I don’t feel like organizing thoughts coherently just now, so I’m gonna just throw together a list of a bunch of stuff I did with no particular order:

• I was called a dick-head by a guy on a bicycle. I had stepped in front of him, so I was fully in the wrong and deserved to have epithets hurled my way, but “dick-head” seems so elementary school. I ended up just laughing.
• I sat and read in about nine different parks. Because why not. That’s how a PDR should spend his vacation.
• I saw that library from Ghostbusters. We stayed in the bit with the public museum-type exhibition, so I didn’t have to run into that librarian ghost lady. I don’t want to run into her.
• This one squirrel came up to me while I was readin in one of the parks and climbed up onto my arm to see if I had any food for him. When he saw I didn’t, he left.
• I ate from a street vendor who had a sign proclaiming that he served “Breakfast and Food”
• I saw the UN. Again, we stayed in the open museum style part instead of going on tours or anything. It was neat.
• I rode the cable car out to Roosevelt Island. Out there the visitor’s information center had a picture of an old cover of Marvel Team-Up or something where Spider-Man and Nightcrawler fought the Punisher on the cable car. (Or maybe it was just an issue of Spider-Man. I don’t know)
• I saw all week’s episodes of the Daily Show, Colbert, and the Walking Dead on television instead of on the computer internet where I usually see them.
• I went to a bar called The Cannibal. I did not order anything with meat in it. And since they don’t serve juice and I don’t drink, I ordered Coke, which is most likely the first time I’ve had pop since years ago when the old ladies I mowed lawns for would insist I have something more substantial than water.
• I saw the gun that they think killed Abraham Lincoln. Also hair samples from Lincoln, JFK, and Elvis were in the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as well, for all of our cloning needs.
• At the same Ripley’s was this one room called the Black Hole, which has all these lights that mess with your perception and makes you think the room was turning upside down. That was cool. If I could I’d just walk through that room all day trying to get my brain to get a grip on it.
• I saw that museum from that movie where everything comes to life. We spent, I think, more than three hours in that museum and we didn’t see a third of it. It seems pretty sweet.
• I saw that boxing robot movie Real Steel. I was better than I anticipated, though exactly as formulaic as you’d expect. For all its family-friendliness, though, it really did seem to me like that society was a step away from a cyberpunk dystopia. And now I want to make a movie Reel Steal about robots who steel a movie or something.

Anyway, that’s everything I can be bothered to remember just now. There was plenty more, but that’ll have to remain Untold Tales of PDR for now.

Hey everyone, PDR is back! I’m not going to murder Marq this time, because his takeover of the site was not a surprise. Instead I will just thank him for minding the place while I’ve been away, then I’ll complain for all the updates to the site ever not being done already.

Anyway, in New York, I got to pet a dog. More details may come later.

Okay, I’m sure I’ve mentioned it somewhere on here, but I’m too tired to be bothered checking so I’ll just say it anew: From the 30th of this month until the 6th of the next, PDR is going to be in the New York, New York, the city so nice, they named it!

I’m similarly confident that I’ve mentioned before: I’m broke. I haven’t so much got money as I have credit cards. And after this trip, even those will be maxed out. So that’s not good. When I get back, I won’t even have room to go further into debt.

So why am I taking the trip? Well it’s a gift, so it isn’t a stupid thing to do. So how did I make it a stupid thing to do? Well, since I wasn’t paying for the trip, I decided that I’d go longer than usual (a full week) and then I’m paying for more hotel and thus I’ve driven up my price. You see?

One downside to this trip that already occurred: I did not manage to get tickets to the Daily Show or Colbert. They were both off the table before the trip was even booked. I never had a chance. But then, out of nowhere, I found out that Conan O’Brien just happened to be doing shows in New York the very week I’m going to be there! Hot dang, I thought as I went to their website to get me some tickets. Except apparently they do this thing where you put your name on the list and you may or may not be given the tickets. Like a lottery. Anyway, I did not get tickets. So there goes that. My several ideas for free entertainment didn’t work out. I’ve got some spending money, but I’m still gonna be on the lookout for cheapness next week.

Nonetheless I look forward to being back in the city where probably I should live. When I get back I plan on doing some real work on getting myself back into financial non-ruin. My goal is that in half a year I should be in a state where I can call myself not poor. So lets see how that works out.

Anyway, I’m not one of those people with good technology, so probably I’m not gonna be posting much next week. Oh well. I’m sure all of you can survive without me guiding you through the Internet for that brief amount of time. If anything important happens, like if I get to pet a dog, I’ll let you know when I get back.

I think I might have a superhuman ability to lose nail clippers. I even wrote a post about it a few hours ago including a haiku about how I can’t find them even though I own two pairs. But then I lost that post too. Superhuman, see?

I will not attempt to recreate the haiku, I am afraid. I could never recapture the moment and to attempt would just cheapen us all.

In other news, as my Halloween-time trip to NYC approaches, it becomes ever more apparent how much money I don’t have. I’m not going to not take the trip, obviously. But I am going to be suffering afterward (and a bit beforeward if I want to have money to spend…).

Such is the way of things.